“Enough! She’s an officer of the law, nothing more.”
She rolled her eyes, taking a small sip from her tumbler. “Did I ever strike you as a fool?”
He clamped his jaw shut, remembering that once, there’d been better days between them. But those days were gone, and all that was left was the ghost of things that had once been.
Setting down her half-finished glass, she shook her head. But her eyes said what her lips did not—she hated him then, and she hated him still. Forgiveness wasn’t in Alice’s nature. It never had been.
“I hope she breaks you. Just like you broke me. The second Celestria is done with her, you take your bitch and leave.” Then she scooted her chair back and left.
Anger, fury, but also a deep-seated self-hatred filled his bones. He stayed in his seat, slamming back the drink she’d given him along with the rest of hers. Then he reached behind him, took the bottle she’d left, and finished that off too. By the time he was done, he was numb.
The pain didn’t hurt so much anymore. The memories weren’t like knives, but more like a jagged piece of flinty rock trying to pierce his emotional wall, but it only hurt a little.
And he was able to forget about her again. About his little butterfly, the only thing he’d ever loved in all the world. Full of innocence and purity, she was the ghost that would forever haunt him and never leave him, and the truth was that he never wanted her to.
He wanted to remember. He wanted the pain because if it still hurt, than she still lived.
Detective Elle
I WOKE up lying in cool water, but not my own. I had been floating in a world of nothingness, feeling as though I’d lost my way, but suddenly, I was back.
Back to being me again.
I frowned, not sure what had happened or why. But I felt good in a way I’d not felt in a long, long time.
I sat up, flipping my tail, and noted what had to be thousands of tiny bruises all over me. Holding out my arms, I saw suction marks there, too, and stared into the abyss, sensing a darkness lingering down, down, down.
I shivered. What the two hells had been done to me, I’d probably never know, but I knew it was time to get out of there.
Swimming to the edge of the pool, I gracefully pulled myself out.
My clothes had been neatly folded, and I frowned, reaching for them. But when I pulled on my shirt, I did not feel the magick of my waters encase me.
Grimacing, I rubbed at my chest, feeling the slight burn of water still left in my shell. The sprite’s magick had run out for me. I had to make it back to my waters soon.
Feeling jittery and dizzy, I dressed as quickly as I could. But even so, when I walked out of the room, I had to cling to the wall for support.
A second later, I felt hands on me and knew without looking up that they belonged to him.
“I thought I’d lost you for a second there, Detective.”
I glanced up at his handsome profile. He was covered in faint, fresh scratches, and for the first time, I didn’t feel the sizzle and burn of the siren magick like I had before. Even so, I was very aware of the power of his body—the graceful predatory sloping walk of his, the way he moved, how he breathed, even how he swallowed.
I liked his looks. I liked them a lot.
I rubbed at my forehead. “Do I even want to know what happened to me down there?”
“I expect not, Detective.”
I frowned. “Well, if you’re going to force me to call you Maddox, then surely you can call me Elle.”
His lips twitched. “As you wish.”
I cleared my throat.
“Elle,” he finished, and I grinned back.
“Yeah, whatever. Look, I feel as weak as a newborn colt. I need my waters.”
He frowned, staring down at me even as he pushed open the exit door. I didn’t have to ask where he’d taken me. Judging by the continued stream of lusty moans and groans, I knew we were at the Crypt. I really, really wanted to know what in the two hells had pulled me back from the siren’s need, but I was also just as sure that sometimes, ignorance really was bliss.
“But you’ve been swimming for the past two hours. Surely, that helped.”
I nodded, gasping a little as I took my first drag of smog-filled Wonderlandian air. Clutching at my shell, I squeezed it tight. Its tiny bit of warmth helped, but not by much.
“I’m… I’m not like other sirens. There are things about me that— ”
He turned me toward him and put a finger over my mouth, and for just a second, I tasted the salt of his skin on my tongue. He shivered as he pulled away.
“Then we go.”
“We?” I raised a brow. “I don’t take just anyone to my waters. In fact, I don’t take anyone at all.”
He raised a brow right back. “I can’t go back to my office. I can’t deal with Harry right now. Or anyone, for that matter. And our investigation is at a standstill until sunup. You asked me not to leave you alone earlier. I’m asking you now to return the favor.”
I almost smiled until I realized just how serious he was. His eyes looked haunted, and there were dark circles beneath them, as though he didn’t often sleep. So I took his callused hand in mine and squeezed gently.
“Then give me the key.”
He handed it over without question, and I felt a moment’s awkward pride that his eyes no longer looked quite so grave.
Swiping the card through the air, I thought of home and heaved a world-weary sigh when we were once again caught up in the between.
His arms circled me, and though I knew none of this was professional, I felt weak, and I rather suspected he did too.
Whatever had happened to me must have been brutal. I’d noted no less than three deep slash marks on his cheeks and neck. I recognized a siren’s furious markings.
Wrapping my arms around him, we held each other as we sailed far to another realm.
Long before I was ready for it, the pathway disappeared, and we stood not upon stars, but sand.
My sand.
A sound full of desperate yearning and longing spilled off my tongue as I shuddered. The rolling waves of home called to me like a lover’s lament.
There was nothing in this place. No grass, trees, birds, game, or any other life. The waters were empty of all of it, but there was still no other place in all the realms I’d rather be. There was peace in this nothingness. It was a place of perpetual night, with silvery clouds and a fat, buttery moon resting high above me.
The breeze smelled of salt.
Maddox smiled. “It’s pretty here. Quiet.” He looked at me.
I shrugged. “Suits me.”
“The cities must be madness for you,” he said, finally pulling back from me.
I frowned, loathe to admit that I actually missed his touch and feeling a prickling of guilt that I should. But I’d not been touched like that in so long. So damn bloody long.
I shrugged. “It is what it is. My penance, or so he says.” I wrinkled my nose when I heard the note of bitterness and turned on my heels.
With angry, jerky movements I stripped, tossing the shirt over my head. Within hours, it would shift back into the water it’d been fashioned from.
Kicking the pants off, I didn’t look back as I turned and walked to my waters. The moment the water touched me, I sang. The song was a loud, wailing lament full of sorrow, desperate fear, and longing. I could no more hold back my song than I could stop coming to these damned waters.
I felt Maddox’s eyes bore into me, but I couldn’t look back at him. With a powerful kick of my tail, I sank into the dark waters, and only then did I unleash it all.
The pain. The fury. The injustice of what had been done to me. To us.
The feelings churning up in me could not be allowed. I’d sworn I would never feel them again. I’d never want them again.
But I’d been lonelier than even I’d known, and I was forgetting, losing myself, seeing things that couldn’t possibly be.
Like maybe Maddox
was a man who also knew the depths of true, soul-stripping pain.
And so I screamed, even as my waters healed me, as they reshaped and formed me into a powerful being that could easily lure a ship and all its booty to the depths of Davy Jones’s locker.
And for just a second, as my tears mingled with the waves, I felt the old hunger and wished I could give in just once more. Just this once. Just so that I could stop the hurting. Stop the feeling. And stop the damned bloody memories that would haunt me until the day I died and returned back to the waters I called home.
But as I drifted alone in that darkness, I knew I never could.
I never could.
And so, with a cold fury sunk deep into my bones, I snatched another golden pearl from the sandy bottom and raced for the above, screaming out to the sprite the moment my head cut water.
“Caytla, come, you damn bloody wench!”
And come she did to watch me sell the last dregs of my soul to her over and over again.
CHAPTER 10
CONSTABLE MADDOX
HE SENSED the difference in her immediately. Gone was the weakness. Her steps were sure and confident, just as they’d been the first night she’d come to him.
Her shift from siren to human was seamless, and he feasted upon her luscious curves as she dressed. It’d been ages since he’d lain with another, not for many months. But not since he and Alice had he actually felt anything other than carnal lust.
Her shirt was a deep, shimmering coral this time, and it contrasted prettily with her unusually electric-blue hair. Her eyes gleamed, and her skin sparkled with a pearlescent sheen.
She wasn’t just beautiful. She was breathtaking.
She wore no boots or pants, only the shirt. Her long legs were naked and on full display. Sirens weren’t a modest bunch, but then, their sole reason for being was to lure in the unsuspecting.
And yet he didn’t fear her. Not that she wasn’t terrifying. He’d seen her at her lowest and in her most terrifying form. But even then, he’d sensed a great effort from her not to give in completely. If she’d wanted, she could have eviscerated him on the spot.
The wind brushed through the long strands of her hair, but she stared out at her waters with her long legs crossed at the ankles and her chin resting on her knees.
She looked lost. Alone.
He blinked. “I’m a father,” he said, not sure why he’d admitted that to her. He never talked of his past, and especially not of his butterfly. But Alice had poked at the memories, dredging them up from the dark pit, and now the ghosts were haunting him.
He felt her look at him, soft and nonjudgmental. He turned to her. She swallowed and reached up with a hand that had, just hours earlier, sliced deep grooves into his flesh. This time, she brushed her knuckles down his jaw tenderly. He trembled and squeezed his eyes shut.
“I thought that maybe you were,” she whispered.
He looked at her, really looked at her, seeing beyond the obvious beauty of her exotic but deadly appeal to the complicated woman beneath. To the only one of her kind who wore a badge. To a woman who had so completely altered her life that it was nearly unrecognizable from what it had once been.
He’d heard the rumors of the mad siren. Everyone had. The mystery of her banishment, and how she’d wound up in Grimm PD, intrigued him. But more than all that, he felt almost like she wasn’t just his responsibility while she handled her investigation through Wonderland, but like she was more. Like she’d always been more. He just hadn’t known it then, or maybe he had.
For so long, he’d dreamt of these waters exactly—barren, stripped of life, but even so, teeming with it. He’d always known, deep down in the very secret part of him, that those waters would one day be his too. He hadn’t known the waters would come with Elle. No one in the lands knew where the mad princess had been banished to. But here she was, and suddenly, he felt like he could breathe again.
For so long, he’d been dead inside, but he felt the life flowing through his veins again, coming to desperate, raging awareness. And that thought scared the ever-loving hells out of him.
But he wouldn’t tell her any of that. It was his secret alone, and would always remain so.
“How could you know I had a child?” he asked, voice thick with so many unnamed emotions.
She dropped her hand, and he scowled at the sand by his feet while drawing lines and circles in the sand.
“Because of your reaction with Pillar. And what you told me about how you’d shared your soul, but it hadn’t helped. Only the loss of something truly cherished could have imprinted such a terrible mark on one’s soul. I could kill that gnome.”
A ghost of a grin feathered over his lips at her impassioned words.
“What’s your child’s name?” she asked softly, but still, he heard her words like a cannon, even over the roar of the waves crashing upon shore.
His soul felt as though it had shattered in his chest. “Her… her name was Mariposa. She was two.”
He swallowed, trying not to let the memories draw too close. Trying not to remember too clearly her snow-white hair, so much like her mother’s, and the dual-colored eyes, just like his own.
“Was?” she whispered, and he should have known she’d latch on to the truth quicker than most. “I’m sorry.”
Tears swam in his eyes, and he swiped at them with his wrist as he thought about that terrible night, the night that had changed the trajectory of his and Alice’s life forever.
He shook his head, clamping down on his tongue. Talking about her had been a mistake. He stared at the waves in silence, feeling raw and exposed, wishing like the two hells he’d not started this conversation.
After a long minute of heavy silence, she sighed. “I killed my lover. At least, that’s what they say.”
The words sounded strained, like she hadn’t wanted to say them, and he looked at her, noting the slide of tears down her cheeks. She was completely still and white as a sheet. Sadness blanketed her small frame.
He wasn’t sure when he’d moved, but suddenly, they were pressed close to one another, not an inch of space between them.
He reached for her hand. Her fingers were cold, but she didn’t let him go. Instead, she clung tightly to him, even as she continued to stare out at the expansive, dark waves of the eternal pools.
“Did you?” he asked softly, grateful to her for changing the subject, but equally worried about her because he knew it wasn’t an easy topic.
She shivered violently, her teeth clacking so hard that he worried she might bite her tongue.
Her gaze cut to his, hypnotic blue eyes swirling with endless depths of desperate pain—pain he, too, experienced. “What does it matter? Perception is reality, no?”
He shrugged. “It’s what they say, but I’ve always thought they were a pack of arrogant pricks that could go hang.”
Through her tears, she laughed. The sound was soft, ethereal, and real. In that moment, he didn’t stop to think about right or wrong, or even care. He placed his finger beneath her chin and tipped her head upward. She gasped but didn’t look away as he leaned down and kissed her.
The touch of her on him lit a fire in his blood, made his body both languid and heavy, desperate for more. But it wasn’t lust that drove him. It was the knowledge that, in her, he’d found someone who understood intimately the demons he lived with day in and day out.
When he pulled back, they were both panting and clutching at each other with desperate hands. Her hands were on his cheeks, and his were on her wrists, as though holding her to him, afraid to let her go, afraid that if she left him, he’d crack again, and all the demons would come flooding back out.
“You asked me earlier about Alice,” he said softly, regretting the necessity of revealing such a personal part of his past.
She shook her head. “You don’t have to. I don’t need to know.”
He frowned, not wanting to share, but also kind of wanting to, too. “The case,” he tried again, words sl
ow and reluctant.
Her brilliant eyes searched his face, studying, imprinting, memorizing him. He held still beneath her look. Elle wasn’t a seer, not like him. She couldn’t see who he’d been, the terrible thing he’d done. But when she looked at him like that, probing, searching, he thought that maybe she saw a lot more than she let on to the rest of the world. It was what made her such a damned bloody good detective.
Her small nostrils flared. “Your life. Your business. Don’t tell me anything because I don’t want to write that report. There are certain pains, Constable, that are our own and belong to no one else.”
Closing his eyes, he hung his chin to his chest and took three deep breaths before trusting himself to speak again. She had to know at least some part of the truth, and she was protecting him from that truth now. His throat felt tight and hot when he cleared the gravel from it.
“We should go back now,” he said, the words so low he hoped she might not hear, wishing in some small part of his mind that they could just stay here forever, locked away on this isolated, lonely island together and never again have to face the pain of a world gone mad.
She nodded. “Yes, Maddox, we should.”
He heard the tightness of her words and understood what she was really saying. They couldn’t be together. Not now. Not ever. They’d flirted earlier, but it had been easy then. They’d not shared anything of true worth between them. But now, they understood there were dark, terrible moments in their pasts and things had to remain professional.
He dropped her hands, standing and dusting himself off. She was right, of course. On the day he’d seen his beloved butterfly crumpled in a heap on the floor, he’d decided that never again would he allow himself to love anything else.
There would be work, and only work, to keep him company.
He didn’t love Elle, but he sensed that she was a woman who could break down all the defenses he’d taken years to build, and that made her more dangerous than just about anything else in all the realms.
“You’re right, Detective. We definitely should.” His words were cold, but courteous.
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